I think the other comments here essentially prove this to be a poor comparison. As has been shown in the comments; most people seem to prefer what they were raised on.
When reading anything where opinions are asked for; I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to mentally think about a bell curve and standard deviation; in that a lot people that are most passionate about their opinion will be sure and answer. If you were to read this thread as canon beliefs about syrup you’d come to the conclusion that the store bought stuff is shit, and only the real thing will do. I honestly think that’s the outliers; and that most people probably don’t care too much one way or the other, and that Log Cabin or Mrs Buttersworth are good enough for the price. As a kid, I remember running out of Log Cabin; and using Karo Syrup and being just fine with that.
To answer the OPs question; I think Left Hand of Dorkness hit the nail on the head: marketing.
Which begs the next question: It never occurred to me that other people put something different on waffles or pancakes in other countries.
It looks like Lemon Curd and marmalade are two things… is there a ‘usual’ product that is used?
Absolutely folks are likely to prefer whatever they grow up with, barring some big change later in life. But I don’t know that most folks don’t care. To me, maple syrup and pancake syrup are real different products. If I stop at McDonald’s for their fluffy mushball pancakes, their syrup is fine just fine. But when I make pancakes and waffles at home, I’m a total snob about it, and there’s no way I’d serve 'em with pancake syrup: if I’m out of maple, I’m using powdered sugar, or jam, or honey, or something else.
I dunno. Maybe you’re right. But I see them as way different.
Frankly, I kind of like Log Cabin. At least I don’t dislike Log Cabin. It’s what we had when I was growing up because it’s what we could afford. And while I recognize real maple syrup is vastly superior, I still buy and use Log Cabin because I feel like I have to be judicious with the real stuff, while I can dump as much Log Cabin on my waffles as I want. I save the real stuff for drizzling over breakfast sausage.
I don’t know about South Africa. But here in America, very few people use golden syrup on their pancakes. The main breakfast syrups like Mrs Butterworth, Log Cabin, and IHOP are all based on corn syrup.
This is, bizarrely enough, related to our political system. The parts of our country that grow corn happen to have a disproportionate strength in national elections. So to win favor in those areas, we have laws that subsidize and encourage the production of lots of corn. One result of this is corn often ends up being used as a sweetener instead of sugar.
Cola isn’t an actual flavor. It’s a mixture of citrus fruits, cinnamon, and vanilla. The citrus fruits will usually be some combination of lemons, limes, and oranges. These flavors get mixed together and you usually can’t identify the individual flavors.
Lemon, lime, and orange aren’t real fruits. They’re various mixtures of citron, pomelo, papeda, and mandarin. Cola is the flavor of a soft drink, so it’s a real flavor in context.
My Dad was a Maple Syrup wholesale buyer at age 8. He’d go out with his mom to the farms and do the tasting. (He also was doing the driving. Different world.)
And he never really liked the real maple syrup from the supermarket. He mostly blamed it on being a Canadian product – too far north for good syrup — but it get’s less sweet and more like tree sap if you push the season.
Maple syrup, cream, fudge and granulated maple sugar were the spring cash crop my family made and sold for 150 years. I grew up on it. I can’t stomach the artificial stuff and don’t even use honey much. I once was served pancakes with sorghum syrup in Missouri and almost puked.
My wife calls the non-fruit syrups “maple”. At least one person on the thread made similar comments. I’m not convinced that maple is the default choice - many people might never have had it due to cost. I prefer Mrs. Butterworth, despite liking maple in candy.
This article from The Atlantic doesn’t quite explain why maple syrup is associated with pancakes, but it does go quite a bit into the history of maple syrup and maple sugar. An interesting side note is that at one point maple sugar was being touted as a slavery-free alternative to cane sugar.
I think the point that was being made is that the flavor of the Kola nut is not what we’re tasting in cola-flavored soft drinks, but a mixture of various other flavors specifically designed to taste good sweetened. The drinks that we call cola now started out as being flavored partially with Kola nut, and that’s why they’ve had caffeine in them even after the Kola nut flavor was de-emphasized, but it’s unlikely that they contain much, if any, Kola nut, and it’s certainly not the flavor of the nut that you’re thinking of when you think of cola drinks. The article you linked even states that Coca-Cola does not have any Kola nut anymore.
Actually you have that backward. The reason we use so much corn syrup is because of the sugar tariffs we have in place to prop up the domestic sugar industry. Corn syrup is a LOT cheaper than cane sugar with the subsidies in place, but not so much at world sugar prices, which are up to 1/3 of the price paid in the US.
Of course corn subsidies don’t do anything but make corn syrup more attractive relative to sugar, but they’re not the reason that corn syrup is used in favor of sugar.
In Wisconsin, we are required to like real maple syrup and real butter, made from real trees and real cows (respectively). We do not suffer heretics gladly.
What do you think “real fruits” means–are you saying they don’t grow in the wild? Because that’s a really weird, and irrelevant, point to make in this thread.
What do you think “real fruits” means–are you saying they don’t grow in the wild? Because that’s a really weird, and irrelevant, point to make in this thread.